There is a case where medicines prescribed to patients are returned to a department for managing medicine prescriptions in a medical institution because of some reasons such as change of prescription (hereinafter, this medicine returned to the medical institution is referred to as a returned medicine). Patent document 1: JP 2013-215343A discloses a returned medicine sorting apparatus for automatically identifying and storing the returned medicine in order to improve efficiency of an operation for treating the returned medicine and prevent human errors in this operation.